What is Non- Fictional Prose?
It is difficult to define non-fictional prose literature. This type of writing is distinct from the bold factual statements found in old chronicles, business letters, or impersonal informational messages. Non-fictional prose literature includes writing intended to instruct (but not highly scientific or erudite writings that lack aesthetic concern), persuade, convert, or convey experience or reality through factual or spiritual revelation.
Nature
Non-fictional prose genres cover a wide range of topics and come in a wide range of shapes. There are probably more than half of all the things that have been written in countries that have their own literature. If this is true in quantitative terms, it means that more than half of what has been written has been in countries with their own literature. Non-fictional prose genres have thrived in almost every country with a well-developed literature. Political and polemical writings, biographical and autobiographical literature, and philosophical and moral or religious writings are some of the types of writings.
From the Renaissance onward, from the 16th century onward in Europe, writing became more personal. This was a big change in writing. It was often in letters, private diaries, or confessions that the author tried to hide his or her own thoughts and feelings. Also becoming more important were aphorisms in the style of the ancient Roman philosophers Seneca and Epictetus, imaginary dialogues and historical narratives, as well as journalistic articles and very wide-ranging essays. From the 19th century, writers in Romance and Slavic languages, especially and to a lesser extent, British and American writers, thought that literature is truly modern when it has a high level of self-awareness and tries to think about its purpose and technique over and over again. They didn’t just write stories and poems. They also wrote prefaces, reflections, essays, self-portraits, and critical articles to explain their work and show how they did it. The French poet Charles Baudelaire said that no great poet could ever resist the temptation to also become a critic—a critic of other people and of himself, he said. As a result, most modern writers who live outside of the United States have written a lot more non-fictional prose than poetry, fiction, or drama. People who wrote 20th-century literature like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, or Thomas Mann and André Gide, for example, may think that their more imaginative writing is just as important as the rest of their work.
It’s almost impossible to come up with a single way to describe non-fictional writing. I think the concern that any definition is a limitation, and maybe even a snub of the most important parts, is more relevant to this huge and diverse literature than anywhere else. People have been grouping literary works into types and modes for a long time. This is because the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers came up with literary genres.
Elements of Non-fictional Prose
In this part, we will talk about the elements of non-fictional prose:
Because non-fictional prose literature is so wide-ranging and diverse, it can’t be said that it has a single goal, technique, or style. If you look at what it isn’t, you can figure out what it isn’t. There are a lot of exceptions that can always be found in such a huge amount of writing to show that any rule or generalisation is wrong. None of these types of writing should be done in a prescriptive way. They should be done in a way that doesn’t tell you what to do. There are no rules for determining whether a dialogue, a confession, or a piece of religious or scientific writing is good, mediocre, or bad. Each author must be appreciated and praised, mostly in his own right. When F.R. Leavis was writing in 1957, he said that the only technique that forced words to show a very personal way of feeling. Intensity might be a good way to judge how good someone is, but it can be hard to find. Polemicists and passionate essayists have a lot more of it than other great people. Virginia Woolf said that the 19th-century critic William Hazlitt’s style was like that of a lover: it made his critical essays more passionate. But Charles Lamb, Walter Pater, and Hippolyte Taine, two of the most important English essayists of the 19th century, were also loved, but in a different way. Others have been aloof, seeming to not care about what they were writing about. La Rochefoucauld, a French epigrammatist of the 17th century, was even sarcastic. These people are very passionate, but in a very different way.
A 19th-century English poet named Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave the name “primary imagination” to writers who had near-divine powers, but the imagination at work in non-fictional prose doesn’t deserve that title. It doesn’t even come close. Non-fictional prose, on the other hand, shows imagination in the fanciful creation of decorative details, in digressions that are practised as an art and have a character of pleasant nonchalance, and in wit and humour that make the reader feel like they know the author. If you write that kind of prose, you can talk about almost any subject you want. The way issues are dealt with can be very didactic and still be in the literary world. For a long time, in many countries, in many languages, in mediaeval Latin, in the writings of Renaissance humanists, and in the writings of the Enlightenment, a lot of literature was meant to teach people how to do things. The idea of art for art’s sake is a new one in the history of culture. Even in the few countries where it was used in the 19th century, it didn’t rule. The ease with which digressions can be added to that kind of prose gives non-fictional writing a freedom that other types of writing don’t have. Any standard of perfection means that there must be implicit rules and vague standards like those that have been set for comedy, tragedy, the ode, the short storey and even the novel. This is why this kind of literature isn’t as good as other types of literature, which are better when they break the rules than when they follow them. The good thing is that in a lot of nonfiction that doesn’t have a lot of structure, the reader gets a sense of ease and nonchalance, a sense of calm, and the rarest of all writing virtues: naturalness.
Style
There should not be any tension, monotony, or self-consciousness in writing non-fictional prose like there is when you write a story. Flaubert and Maupassant’s fans spend a lot of time looking for le mot juste (the right word) in non-fictional writing. The novel and short storey, on the other hand, are much more important in terms of finding the right word. As an English author, he called literature “that rare, almost miraculous use of language by which someone truly says what he means.” Chesterton himself was more successful with his rambling volumes of reflections and religious apologetics than with his novels, but he said that literature was that rare, almost miraculous use of language. If you read an essay, a report or a travel storey, the author doesn’t want to overwhelm his readers by making them think he knows where he’s going, like a dramatist or a detective-story writer might do. Some rambling casualness, seemingly irrelevant anecdotes, and hints about what the author wants his readers to think are often more effective than extreme brevity.
There is also another way to write that pays more attention to the rhythm and elegance of prose, in the style of the ancient Roman orator Cicero. Essayist William Hazlitt said that the British statesman Edmund Burke (1729–97) had the best style and the best prose that didn’t fall over the edge of poetry. He said that this was the closest to poetry that he had ever seen. Many English writers have liked to write in a harmonious, rhetorical way. This may have been because they were familiar with Cicero, but also because the Bible’s official text had a big impact on their writing (1611). Martin Luther’s translations of the New Testament (1522) and the Old Testament (1534) have had a big impact on the way Germans write and think about the world.
American and British readers no longer liked this kind of writing in the 20th century. They no longer looked up to Latin orators and Biblical prose as models. German literature, on the other hand, was more likely to be praised for its harmonious balance and eloquence. In other languages that were more closely related to Latin, a musical style, which was like a long poem in prose, was more often practised, as in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Italian writings, Andre’ Gide’s French writings, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s German writings, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Non-fictional writing, with its lack of cumulative continuity and smaller size, seems to make it easier for readers to deal with a style like this one. In novels like Marius the Epicurean (1885) and sometimes in Thomas Mann’s fiction, this style can be a turn-off for the reader. When writing non-fiction, it’s easier to add hints of irony, archaisms, alliterations and even authorial interventions that might not be so easy to do when writing a storey. Critics have said that paying too much attention to style can make it hard to get the big picture in fiction. They say that some of the best novelists, like Dickens, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, and Zola, wrote bad at times. It is common for essayists, historians, orators, and divines to pretend to be happy-go-lucky in order to put them on the same level as the average reader. But they know that language and style are important. They need to know what kinds of things they can use to make vivid images, brilliant similes, well-balanced sentences, or surprise epigrammatic effects.
